Influencer Hilaria Baldwin has been involved in controversy in recent days.
The podcaster, yoga instructor, and social media celebrity has been accused of faking her Spanish roots. However, she said that critics had been misrepresenting her.
Twitter users have been making posts suggesting that her name, as well as the accent she has employed in some interviews and her alleged Spanish identity, are not entirely real.
Some of them have compared her identity with her uncommon Spanish, concluding that actor Alec Baldwin’s wife was born Hillary Hayward-Thomas in the US. They also said that Hilaria’s parents are American.
But she told the New York Times: “There is nothing I’m doing wrong.”
There was a clip of her that went quickly viral. The video showed Hilaria on TV speaking with an accent and forgetting the English translation of ‘cucumber’.
However, some people that knew the influencer as Hillary Hayward-Thomas alleged that she did not use that Spanish accent when she was in high school.
They also said that she was “the archetypal northeastern prep schooler”. There were also people saying that Hilaria’s management agency wrote an online biography stating that she was born in Mallorca, the Spanish island.
But the New York Times said she was born in Boston, Massachusetts.
It also said that her parents are David L. Thomas Jr. and Dr. Kathryn Hayward, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.
Hilaria Baldwin claimed that people had been confused in some ways by people misrepresenting her. She explained that her parents had formed deep bonds with Spanish when she was a child.
The 36-year-old said her parents took her to Spain every year but she didn’t want to explain how frequently they visited the country or how long they stayed there.
“It would be maddening to do such a tight timeline of everything,” she said. “Sometimes there was school involved. Sometimes it was vacation. It was such a mix, mishmash, is that the right word? Like a mix of different things.”
According to her, she grew up bilingual and her family often spoke Spanish and cooked Spanish food at home. “When we weren’t in Spain, we called it, ‘we brought Spain into our home,'” she said.
Hilaria also denied cultural appropriation and said: “Who is to say what you’re allowed to absorb and not absorb growing up? This has been a part of my whole life and I can’t make it go away just because some people don’t understand it.”
She and her husband have five children with Spanish names. They are Carmen Gabriela, Rafael Thomas, Leonardo Ángel, Romeo Alejandro and Eduardo Pao Lucas.
Hilaria’s parents and older brother currently live in Mallorca.
